


dogs don't go to heaven (but they sure as hell do try)

by thebeespatella



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-10 03:56:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27897913
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thebeespatella/pseuds/thebeespatella
Summary: Girls like Hannibal don’t hang out with girls like Will.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Comments: 10
Kudos: 45





	dogs don't go to heaven (but they sure as hell do try)

**Author's Note:**

> WELL, WELL, WELL, I said to myself. What _do_ you want when everything's on fire; what petty luxuries do you allow yourself when your house is burning down? Of _course_ —it's 2010-era run-on sentence fic, complete with a lowercase, overlong title with some bonus parentheticals, back from when we all wanted more sass and less seriousness and there was a hell of a lot less clinical terminology being thrown on Twitter per capita. Hope and change! we said to ourselves. Things were looking up! How's that going? 
> 
> Anyway. This fic is mostly completed but it is also running away from me all at once, so I don't know how long it's going to be, but I'm stuck, so I'm posting, which, as we all know, has always worked out great. I hope this brings you a little joy in your corner of the world.

Girls like Hannibal don’t hang out with girls like Will. 

That’s the crux of it, she thinks, taking the end of her pen out of her mouth to sneak a glance at Hannibal reading across from her at their little table. Hell, girls like Hannibal didn’t even belong under fluorescent library lights, probably, but needs must, or whatever, so now they’re sitting across from each other, Will pretending to focus on her work and Hannibal actually focusing on hers, like the freak of nature that she is. Yes, freak of nature, unlike Will, who is a freak wholly of human creation. Hannibal could probably wear flower crowns and—and streaks of sacrificial goat’s blood like she’d been born in them. Midsommar shit. Will can barely make it into sweatpants. 

Girls like Hannibal don’t hang out with girls like Will. And that’s fine. Will was disabused about her notions of friendship long ago and continues to accept Bev’s whole _thing_ mostly out of begrudging curiosity, plus, they live together, so it’s hard to avoid. Rent is high and capitalism is a curse, etcetera. So, it’s fine: except it keeps happening. 

“Will,” Hannibal says. Right. Still happening. “May I see your notes?”

“No,” Will says, and keeps her eyes down on the one sentence she has written. 

“Why not?”

“Take your own notes.”

“I do. I’d like to see yours.”

“Like a dog with a bone,” Will mutters, but Hannibal smiles, and Will flips back a few pages and shoves the notebook at her. “Happy?”

“Exceedingly,” Hannibal says, looking down at Will’s untidy scrawl with the same intensity she’d been giving Dante or whatever other horn-rimmed retro tumblr bullshit she’d been reading earlier. 

“All right, are you done? C’mon, we’re burning daylight here.”

“I am not finished. And it’s nearly eight o’clock.”

“It’s an _expression_ , give that back.”

Hannibal hands the notebook back—so goddamn _amiable_ , Will wants to smack her—and tilts her face down with a conspiratorial expression that makes Will’s mouth twist. If there’s a joke, she’s not inside it, but Hannibal seems to want to keep looking at her like that anyway, and it’s not like Will is the Look Police. What, like it’s a crime to enjoy it. “Will,” she says. “You seem to have taken notes in reverse.”

“What are you talking about,” Will says, snatching the notebook back. “Reverse, what—”

“You seem to have formulated strong and coherent arguments about why Professor Crawford, not to mention everyone else in the class, is wrong,” Hannibal says, and she actually reaches over to smooth over the paper where Will’s crinkled it in her hastiness. The audacity. “But that is all you have written down.”

“They’re still _notes_ , and I’m not, like, _da Vinci_ —”

“You’ve only written down—”

“Yes, yes, fine! I get it. It’s a technique. Can you let me get back to writing. I’m very busy.”

“Of course,” Hannibal says, and picks up her book. “After all, you were being so productive.”

“I _was_ , until you interrupted me with your pervasive invasions into my privacy,” Will says. “‘No’ means ‘no,’ haven’t you heard.”

Hannibal has a face, that in Will’s nascent yet storied career of watching it while pretending to do something else, Will has dubbed her Patient Face. It looks like a small smile, but Will can feel—no, not feel, _see_ —the strain in the corners and the mild death in her eyes. Honestly, it brings Will a warm glowing coal of happiness. It feels closer to the truth. Whatever bullshit Hannibal thinks she’s peddling with her whole Miss Pan-European act, Will isn’t buying it. No matter how much she’d like to attend the swimsuit portion of that event. 

Will stabs a hole in the paper with the tip of her pen. It doesn’t make her feel better, but, you know. She’s trying. 

She doesn’t even know how she got here. First day of class she’d scooted in late because the ICC is a fucking shitshow, why are there A and B classrooms when there are just _numbers_ available, and she’d landed next to Hannibal in the front row reluctantly and by accident, not sparing a second glance. She’d had Crawford before, so he just nodded at her in that stiff way that was impossible to interpret as anything but _benignly irked_ , which, fine, Will’s earned it. You crack a bad joke one time. Or a couple bad jokes a couple times. 

But that’s another story—she’d sat in the last available seat in the front row and paid zero attention because it was syllabus day, which, as far as she’s concerned, should be a freebie. But then Crawford had made mention of a trip of the Evil Minds Museum, which is a name only commensurate in shittiness with the project itself, and Will couldn’t help herself: she snorted. 

She’d felt two sets of eyes flick to her: Crawford’s, growing from benignly to actively irked, but only for a moment. And then Hannibal’s, next to her, lit like a dread skull in the classroom light in a way that should have been unflattering but instead baited Will’s gaze and now she was hooked. She wasn’t quite yet fucked, but more’s the pity. Take ‘em where you can get ‘em. They’d settled on a compromise on day three, because Will was intent on sitting all the way in the back, and Hannibal was a front-row kind of absolute suck-up nerd, so now they sit in the middle, but all the way on the left, which is okay. 

This study-buddy thing, though. Unbelievable. 

It’s probably impolite, and, more importantly, just dishonest, to snap at Hannibal to just _go away_. Will’s not sure it’d even work, and she’s not here to make a scene on Lau 2, she’s better than those prep school fucks, swanning from table to table, talking about what a great time they had on the Cape or whatever. What Hannibal even wants in a study buddy is beyond Will’s meager comprehension. As far as she can tell, Hannibal’s notes are tidy, well-ordered, and written in ridiculously pretty script with what Will’s pretty sure is a goddamn fountain pen, and yet, Hannibal is sitting here, with her, with her dollar-store notebooks and her pens cribbed from recruiters’ tables. It’s probably gross that she puts them in her mouth, but whatever. 

Will had been very sure she was past trying. Not _because_ of what happened with Alana, she wasn’t going to be the world’s saddest sack of shit on two legs, not without a little more effort, anyway; but because of what she’d realized after: she wasn’t built for this. There had been plenty of self-loathing in the bottom of the handle of whiskey that Will had finished, after, but this wasn’t that, not really—just confirmation of something she’d suspected for some time. Dating: just not for me, and by extension, any of the things that happened after dating. There’s still plenty of before, for Will, at least while college lasts. 

Besides, she doesn’t even know if Hannibal swings that way. Admittedly, she’d be hard-pressed to name anything gayer than Hannibal rolling up to class in an honest-to-God three-piece suit, but sometimes it’s hard to tell between queer and #aesthetic. 

So Will has stubbornly committed to not trying. Which is why she says, out of nowhere, “Whatever, I’m getting chips,” and goes to feed change into the vending machine in the corner. Standing there, she’s highly aware of how stupid it is to delight in trying to dissuade Hannibal from spending time with her via the college student merit badge of a gross diet, but her psychiatrist had once looked her in the eye and said, “You have a little of oppositional-defiant in you, don’t you,” to which Will had laughed and said, “Oh, yeah?” Which didn’t exactly disprove that theory. And there was no greater antithesis to all of what Hannibal is than spicy nacho Doritos, except maybe Taco Bell. 

The dumb chihuahua jingle is going hard in her head when she comes back to the table. It would be rude, right, to just scream, _”What’s your deal, bitch?”_ in Hannibal’s face. Not the least because this is technically a library. Will’s never shied away from rudeness; not out of a particular commitment to causing offense, but in defiance of the expectation that she shouldn’t, but this feels like it might be egregious. It would, at least, be honest. The question she really wants to ask. 

Hannibal cuts her musing off at the knees, in any case. “Unfortunately, I must go,” she says, shutting her notebook with a crispness. All her movements seem preordained and premeditated. “I’m hosting a little dinner party at my apartment.”

“It’s Wednesday,” Will says, and cringes at herself. Plebeian. 

“Yes, just a small gathering,” Hannibal says. 

“Didn’t know the landed class partied so hard,” Will says. “All right, have fun at your polo match or whatever.”

Hannibal smiles at her, in a way that feels insistently and stingingly _indulgent_ , says, “It’s too dark for polo,” and Will wants to sneer, but instead finds her hand helplessly caught in an abortive movement to—what, _wave goodbye_ , like Hannibal’s going to sea, just launching off at the pier on the H.M.S. Douchebag—“I’ll see you in class,” Hannibal says. 

“The hell you will,” Will says, nonsensically, to her retreating back. It’s so easy to pick her out in the crowd, tall and broad in her coat, and she can’t help but watch her walk away for a standstill airless moment. 

This might be a problem.

&

“Katz,” she calls, when she gets home. “Katz, I have a problem!”

“Don’t kick the door shut, you know it gets stuck. And the Bachelor’s almost over, then we can talk about your crisis, okay.” 

“I said it was a _problem_ , I don’t think it rises to the level of _crisis_ —“

“Graham,” Beverly says, not looking up from the TV. “You’re a daily crisis. Sit down and we’ll talk about it. After.” 

“Fine,” Will says, and kicks her feet up. “So which indistinguishable white woman is gonna win this week?”

“You don’t win the Bachelor, Will.” 

“Doesn’t somebody get the ring in the end?”

“Shh.” 

“Do you need a beer? I’m gonna get a beer.”

Beverly raises her half-full bottle in silence and Will takes her cue, busies herself with her own bottle of the Stella that Beverly buys just so she can complain about it. It doesn’t taste like leisure, exactly, but compromise is a kind of relaxation. Will grumbles through the last ten minutes of the show but not enough to make Beverly physically slap her hand over Will’s mouth the way she’d had to during the last finale, and they sit in amicable pettiness until the closing credits. 

“Wait,” Beverly says. “I have to fill in my bracket.” The quiet scratch of the Sharpie on paper, and then Beverly turns her bright gaze on Will and Will regrets saying anything at all. “So. What’s your _problem_.”

“I, um.” The label on the Stella is suddenly fascinating. “There’s this girl.”

“Mhm,” Beverly says. To her credit, she makes it sound like only mild suffering, considering how much she’d tied Will’s shards together with kitchen twine the last time there had been _a girl._

“I don’t know, she keeps sitting next to me in class. And she finds me in the library. I think we’re study buddies, which is pretty horrific. She keeps—sitting with me, what am I supposed to do about it, she’d probably have me in the stocks if I didn’t—it’s stupid, why is she even. I cannot and will not abide this continued—fucking _assault_ , is what it is, with her clothes, and her face, she deserves the guillotine. I don’t understand why she keeps—”

“Will,” Beverly says. “Are you being sexually harassed?”

“Will you please be serious—”

“I _am_ —”

“—because I don’t need your shit right now, I truly can’t handle it—”

“What’s her name?”

“Hannibal,” she says. It’s the first time she’s said it out loud, and it sounds strange to her, as though it belongs on some other tongue. “Hannibal Lecter.” 

“How did you meet?”

“In Crawford’s class, it’s not important.” Will tries to meet her eyes, she really does, but multi-tasking is for suckers. “She just keeps— _stalking_ me, and I do not enjoy it.”

“In the way that you don’t let yourself enjoy things, ever, Will,” Beverly says. “You’ve always had trouble wanting things.”

Jesus Christ. “Bev,” she says, instead of responding to that weapon of an insight, “why didn't we ever—”

“Because,” Beverly says, “I love you, I really do, Will, but I’m not in love with you, and I suspect you don’t want me to be, anyway.”

“Fine, when you put it that way,” Will grouses, face hot from the word “love” even being said near her name, and with a direct relationship like that, too, not like _Will loves coffee_ , because that one’s true, or _Will loves being on time_ , because that one isn’t, and it’s easier when things have clarity, that’s the only way—

“Oh, honey,” Beverly says. 

“Gummy worm,” Will snaps, and on Beverly’s eye roll, “Sorry, thought we were just listing confectionery products.”

Beverly sighs, heavy and full, and Will is straitjacketed, suddenly, by a roiling thrill of terror— _she’s tired of you, it’s happened, it’s finally happened_ —and then Beverly looks at her with a look in her eyes that’s so unmistakably kind that the feeling only gets worse, stretching rubber band-tight around her throat. “Will,” she says. “It’s okay.”

“What?”

And then Beverly laughs and the rubber band eases. “You like someone, and maybe they like you back. It’s not a _death knell_ , Christ, Graham.”

“It _is_ —”

“A _guillotine_ , get a grip,” and she’s laughing again, it’s okay, it’s okay, until she says: “You should get to know her. She sounds like fun.” Obviously Will has to stand up and go to her room after that. _Fun._ What the fuck is that. 


End file.
